Quotes from Philosophy Between the Lines

By Arthur Melzer (2014)

• If modern scholars thought more like wily peasants, they would be less resistant to the essential truth that there is always more freedom in the world than the compliant surface of things would lead one to suppose. Thus, the true history of human reason is of necessity a secret history: when the practice of philosophic secrecy is once seen, then the faculty of human reason no longer appears quite as servile and culture-bound as it inevitably does to us.#
  Proverb
• If the world is originally well ordered, then God is needed to explain that order. And if it is incurably disordered, then God is needed to save us from that disorder. Only if life is originally bad but fixable through human effort is it the case that God is neither a necessary hypothesis nor a fundamental need.#
  ReligionEpistemology
• In traditional society, it was common to ask, “can an atheist be an honest man?”; in modern society, the question has become “can a believer be a tolerant man?” Just as the former society demands unity and strength of belief, so the latter tends to demand pluralism and skepticism.#
  HistoryReligion
• Reason is set in motion by the awareness of arbitrariness out contingency. It is driven to wonder at and to question everything accidental and ungrounded—driven to seek the cause, the explanation, the underlying necessity…. But custom if precisely the power to bestow on the contingent the appearance of necessity. It makes us feel that what is and has been must be, that it simply cannot be otherwise. #
  Epistemology
• What it means, on the deepest level, for a society to be “traditional” is not merely that its subjects happen to follow old habits and customs, but that, on some level, they understand themselves to be fallen from the originary fullness of the world, from the divine era; that they live in remembrance and repentance, in hunger for the past.#
  History
• Classical philosophy was defined against nonphilosophic life and the realm of commonsense “opinion” out of which it emerged. Modern philosophy, by contrast, is defined against an existing false philosophy, against scholasticism, and so has a far more academic and historically contingent character.#
  PhilosophyHistory

Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1891)

• The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.#
  ReligionHistory

Fustel De Coulanges, The Ancient City (1864)

• Among all ancient nations the law had been subject to, and had received all its rules from, religion. Among the Persians, the Hindus, the Jews, the Greeks, the Italians, and the Gauls, the law had been contained in the sacred books or in religious traditions…. Christianity is the first religion that did not claim to be the source of law…. Men saw it regulate neither the laws of property, nor the orders of succession, nor legal proceedings. It placed itself outside the law, and outside all things purely terrestrial. Law was independent; it could draw its rules from nature, from the human conscience, from the powerful idea of the just that is in men’s minds. It could develop in complete liberty.#
  ReligionHistory